Print Publishers Adapting to E-books and Digital Downloads

By Brad Sylvester

With the rising popularity of tablets, Kindles, iPads, and other capable e-reader devices, one wonders whether e-books will surpass the printed book in the same way that downloadable music has outpaced disk sales in recent years. Are publishers fighting the e-book trend or embracing it? One publisher, Princeton University Press, has a new e-book Shorts Program designed to leverage print material in the e-reader market, not by simply republishing the book in electronic form, but by using it to
create a different product for a different audience.

I recently spoke with Rob Tempio, the Executive Editor overseeing the Princeton Shorts Program and Leslie Nangle, Associate Marketing Director at Princeton University Press to discuss their new approach to e-book publishing and to find out how the advent of online content and e-books have affected the publishing business in general.

What is the Shorts Program at Princeton University Press?

Rob Tempio: The Shorts Program is an effort to extract content from our existing works and publish them as e-books. We take books that we’ve already published and extract a chapter or a set of chapters from those books and repackage them as e-book only products.

What’s your goal for the program? Is it aimed at gaining additional revenue from your existing properties directly through the e-book sales or to help market the hard-copy form of the full book?

Rob Tempio: Additional revenue is definitely one of the purposes, but it’s also to get our content out in a different format for a different audience that we think exists for the book: an audience that might be looking for a briefer version of our longer books. If
someone reads the shorter version or chapter, they might have their appetite whetted for the whole book. That’s certainly the hope. We tie them together pretty closely. There are live links within the e-book leading to the full book. We give them new titles, but the sub-titles indicate that it’s a selection from the larger work.

Leslie Nangle: They are stand-alone chapters. You can read them and enjoy them without ever reading the full book………..